How do you leverage sales ads during a live launch? This episode is packed with value! Learn the keys to running successful sales ads during a live launch, why they are so important and how to be successful without spending a ton of money. If you’re running a live launch soon, you don’t want to miss this episode!
Key Points:
2:04 How sales ads are different from any other campaign
3:21 What is Marie Forleo doing that you should be doing every time you launch
3:53 What should your 7 day launch look like
5:54 What you’re really paying for when you’re running sales ads (hint: it’s not just purchases)
6:48 What are the three main ads that bring in the most sales and one the most powerful way to get people to buy your product
9:35 Learn how one client got over 900X ROI with her sales ads – over a million dollars in revenue
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In today’s episode we’re going to talk about sales ads during a live launch. So if you launch and you have a open cart period that is five days, seven days, three days, whatever it is, to your online product or service this is what this episode will be covering. I get questions a lot on like how do I leverage those sales ads. How do I set up sales ads? How do I basically use ads to get sales?
[00:00:30]
And if you’re not familiar with the Hirsh process, go back to the beginning episodes of this podcast and listen to that Hirsh process, because our step four process in the Hirsh process is sell. And that is sales ads, meaning, we run ads to warm traffic, people who know you, they’re either on your email list, they’ve watched your videos, they’ve engaged on your page, visited your website, any of those buckets of warm traffic. We run traffic during the sales ad, during the open cart period to warm traffic.
[00:01:30]
And you have to be really strategical with sales ads because it’s definitely different than running just like lead generation ads because you have a way bigger audience when you do that. You know, you can reach millions and millions of new people. And most of the time your sales ads are limited to your warm audience. So you have to be creative, and you can’t put out a bunch of different versions of ads because what will happen is it won’t reach the people. It’s not a big enough audience for you to have. You know, I’ve seen people make a mistake of having like five sales ads, and they have an audience size of 20,000 and they try and put it out there to them, and it just doesn’t [span 00:01:37] or the frequency score gets really high.
[00:02:00]
So I’m sharing with you guys today kind of our general process for a seven day open cart. So you can adjust based on the time period of your open cart, and then I’m going to kind of share with you the keys and the golden pieces in here, because if I haven’t emphasized it enough in the past I want to emphasize it here how important sales ads actually are. Because this is your chance that you don’t have to spend a lot of money, because you only have to reach that warm traffic.
[00:02:30]
So you don’t have to spend a lot of money, and you’re able to reach people in a more effective way in my opinion than email, because everybody is scrolling Facebook. So when your cart is open, you want people to be seeing your ads everywhere. Think about when big influencers launch, and I’ll use Marie Forleo’s launch for example. Like not only are we running ads, you know, for her that are everywhere. Sales ads during the open cart, but you have her affiliates also running ads to promote her stuff. I mean she’s literally everywhere, and that is a very successful launch in the space where that’s the goal. You want to be everywhere. Visibility everywhere when your cart is open. Especially to your core warm traffic, because you need them to know that it’s open.
[00:03:00]
So, during this seven day open cart, that’s what I’m going to use as an example, again adjust it depending on how long your cart is. But the key is having some different creative versions that you can continually change out as well as some creative versions of ads that run ongoing during the entire time.
[00:03:30]
So our normal process is we have one creative like sales. When I say creative version, I mean like a version of copy and images and headline. And we will vary between either telling a story, obviously giving information about the product and then other important things are pushing the urgency, doors are closing soon. Only X amount of spots. Any of those things that get people to take action are super important in that ad copy.
[00:04:00]
So we’ll have one creative version that runs for the first two days, and we drive that to all of warm traffic. And then we change it out. And we have one that goes for the days two to four, and then four to six. And what this does is basically you don’t want people seeing the same exact ad for your entire seven day period, because they’ll start to just tune it out. So if you create really engaging versions of creative ads and then you cycle them through during that time period, you will get people’s attention more, because it will be something new.
Now in there you can have a video. So if one of your creative versions and things that you want is a sales video that you have of you, maybe it’s straight to camera. Like that can be one of the versions.
Now if anything is converting, and you’re getting amazing sales. I’m not saying always turn it off, I’m saying maybe add something new, or if it starts to saturate and conversions are clicks you can change it out with something new.
[00:04:30]
With sales ads, one of the things that we look at a lot is obviously you can look at cost per sale in Facebook, but sometimes Facebook’s reporting can be a little delayed with sales, and the only time that you actually get attributed sales to your Facebook ad is if people … like that was the last ad that they saw before they bought.
[00:05:00]
So you have to also keep in mind that when you’re running sales ads you are obviously wanting like a cost per sale that’s really good. But you’re also paying for the visibility because somebody might see your ad for two days, then get your sales email and click your sales email and buy, and they may not attribute directly to Facebook, but still you are top of mind the entire time because of your ads.
So just keep that in mind, we obviously want the most accurate tracking as possible. But sales ads play a bigger piece, and that is visibility on top of mind during your open cart period.
[00:05:30]
We also have a 48 hour cart open, and a 24 hour cart open. And so that means we shift our copy a little bit to say doors closing in 48 hours, or doors closing in 24 hours, or doors closing on September 1st, or whatever it is, so that you have that massive urgency that it’s coming in the next 48 and 24 hours. And so we have a different ad version for those two scenarios that we will push out 48 hours and 24 hours before a cart opens.
[00:06:00]
And then ongoing throughout the seven days we have three different ads that we normally run. One, testimonial ad. Now it will depend on your audience size. You may not have a big enough audience size to run all of these, but we typically like one to two different testimonial ads running throughout the launch so people continually see people’s results. That’s one of the most powerful ways to get people to buy your product or service and see the results other people have gotten and build that trust with you. So you should have some powerful testimonials.
[00:06:30]
Now it doesn’t mean just take a testimonial video someone recorded of you, throw it up on Facebook with a little bit of copy and people will love it. Play with either having the video with engaging copy or often times we’ve taken a video or a story and we’ve created ad copy that’s like meet so and so. Meet Bob who was failing at this before he came into work with us, and like turn it into an ad copy, that story and a photo of the person. And sometimes that converts better. I know when I scroll the feed I don’t always like watch testimonial videos I see, but if it’s a really engaging story about somebody, I will watch it.
[00:07:00]
Now again testing like you don’t know exactly what people are going to respond to, but test that. And so have ongoing testimonial ads throughout your seven day period that you run to your warm traffic. And then here are the two most important ones that you probably will need to set up. And that is an abandoned cart ad and abandoned sales page ad. So you need to make sure you have an ad for people who have clicked on your sales page and not purchased, and an ad for people who have clicked all the way to your order form, and not purchased.
[00:07:30]
And if you have a launch strategy that’s like an application, then you could do people who have started to fill out the application and not finished. These are so cheap to run because it’s such a small audience, you’re only targeting those people who have taken those actions, and you set that up using the pixel with audiences that are using the URL of those different pages and locations.
[00:08:00]
And then you can create ads that would speak to those people, depending on those. So like one example that I’ve shared in a previous episode, but it was an abandoned cart ad. And I love straight to camera videos here. I love like on the cell phone, “Hey you were almost there. You almost purchased … but you stopped. Why?” You know, “Hey, you might be feeling this, you might be scared about this investment. I was here when I was doing this, but you know what? We’ve gotten so many students who like share, you know? We’ve gotten all these results and you’re so close, don’t forget to save your spot. We won’t open up again for six months, and the doors close on this day.” You know, something like that.
[00:09:00]
Put that in target people who haven’t purchased yet, and it’s so powerful and so we had a client who had a massive launch last year over 20 million. And we spent $1100 on her abandoned cart ad because there wasn’t obviously a big audience, and she made over a million dollars. I think it was like 62 sales or 612 sales at $2,000 with $1100 ads put on her abandoned cart. Like that’s insane! $1100 that’s been $1.2 million in revenue if I did all the math right. I’m pretty sure she was like 1.1 almost 1.2.
612 sales, $2,000. And those people may have not even bought. And they bought because of that video and they loved it. You should have seen the comments on that. They were like, “Oh my gosh! I’m so glad …” Like she was speaking to them.
[00:09:30]
And so abandoned sales page and abandoned cart. And you can tie in here like testimonials. So sometimes I’ll say, “Okay, if somebody clicks on a sales page and then they bounce off, I’m going to show them this specific testimonial of somebody who was talking about how they almost didn’t buy.
So I have another powerful story of a course that somebody was selling. And she had a testimonial video where one of her students was like I was hovering over the order form page, and I was filling out my credit card and I just didn’t press go, and like I did that for three days and then I finally pressed go, and once I bought the course, I was able to quit my job and build my business. And it was just a really powerful testimonial.
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So we use that testimonial, and we targeted people who were maybe doing that same exact action by visiting the sales page and not completing their order.
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So that brings me into my next point. So those are the ads. Let me recap really fast. We do a different ad for the first two days, two to four days, four to six days, and then 48 hour, 24 hours until cart closes. I think that’s cart open. But 48 hour cart closes, 24 hour cart closes ad. And then we have testimonial ad sprinkled in there. Abandon cart, and abandon sales page. And I suggest that you set this up in a campaign planner so that you have it very organized before our launch, for all of our clients launches. We have a spreadsheet. Goes in a campaign planner. We have the copy.
And so that brings me to my final point. One of the key things that you can do with an open cart launch, or really any ads, but especially here that we do really well, that our clients do well, because our creative team does this really well, and that is speak to people very specifically based on actions that they have taken.
[00:11:00]
So for example, if you have people that during your launch you know they attended your webinar, target them with a specific sales ad that’s talking about or relating the webinar itself, and the fact that you know that they attended the webinar and the content there to the actual course. Because you have a piece of knowledge there that you know that person is interested in the content that you had on your webinar. So you need to interest them with the content of your course in the same exact way, and tie that together.
[00:11:30]
Or you have people on a wait list to your product and it’s opening. They better get a specific sales ad that speaks to them on the wait list. So not only just like … Don’t just throw up sales ads to throw up sales ads and be like, “I’m doing my retargeting.” Make the messaging really specific and look at people. You’re going to have different levels of warm traffic. You’re going to have like your entire buckets of warm traffic and people who have watched videos and done all that.
[00:12:00]
But then you’re also going to have people who have signed up for specific things maybe during your launch or before your launch, and the key is making ad copy that is specific and speaks to them and really connects with them. Like remember that you guys, marketing at the end of the day when it works it’s about connection.
So how during your open cart can you connect with your audience through re-targeted sales ads and make a ton of money?
[00:12:30]
Plan them out, be really intentional, don’t rush through them, because if you do it right your re-targeted ads can make you the most ROI in your entire launch. So don’t miss out on them, don’t skip out on them and don’t cheat them. Do a good job with them because they are some of the most effective marketing that you can do for your Facebook ads.
And if you have a launch coming up or you need help with your strategy or you want somebody to create some badass retargeting ads for you go to helpmystrategy.com and book in a call with the Hirsh team.